Berks county Pennsylvania- here’s what my patch looks like . Anise hysop, butterfly weed, swamp milkweed , and goldenrod did really well here last year. I just left it all winter. Now I’m unsure what to do. Do I leave all the stems and weed the grass? When do I remove these large stems? How do I keep grass from coming back before I know where to mulch bc the new plants still aren’t here? This will be my second year and you can see I’m doing another large patch next to this one just with different natives. Any advice on how to get my patch thriving again this year would be greatly appreciated . Also , for my anise hysops that came out of the ground, does that mean those ones won’t grow again? I thought their roots are supposed to get deeper every year.
by Mountain_Plantain_75
12 Comments
When the spring comes, do you add any soil/mulch? Mine looks similar but not sure what to add.
Based patch.
how did you prepare this for planting?
lawn grass is tough as they come. that’s its thing – you can play on it and torture it and it will just regrow from horizontally growing rhizomes.
it looks like maybe you punched a few holes in it and put in a few dozen plugs. There aren’t any defensible borders, like paths or physical barriers. a mulched no man’s land can work but that needs to be maybe two or three feet wide. Look for ways to continue growing the patch.
depending on how many plants you have, removing lawn from plantings can be super hard. in some early plantings it even makes sense to remove the planted plants, rake and clear it up, let grass green up, then spray it, then replant. Sounds tedious but is labor saving.
ideally you’ll kill more turf grass and get more of a “plant community” that works together all year. well scaled native grasses and sedges are a huge, missing component here
the only reason I’d maybe suggest removing your debris now is to open it up for a year of enhanced maintenance. You need to see what’s going on. Removing it isn’t necessary in established plant communities, and it’s largely where nature happens.
I’m in exactly the same boat with an area of my yard where I removed grass and planted last year. I’m in Seattle, so ahead of you by a bit in terms of regrowth. In the past two weeks when I was seeing a lot of green growth, I started spending time every day out there with a hori-hori, extracting grasses and weeds I don’t want from between all the native perennials I do want. If tall dead stems from last season are in the way, I’m pulling what easily breaks away, but not pruning anything. It’s a pain, but waiting for that burst of growth has helped differentiate and also visualize next steps.
Now I’m augmenting with a few new plants, then will be spreading arborist chips. But I’m stumbling through like you, so watching for other advice…
I spend time every spring and fall hand pulling lawn grass and non-native volunteers from my mulched and rock beds. I’ve embraced it, almost relaxing now and satisfying when done.
Best advice I have for how we do ours is till annually, we were advised to do that the first five years while everything continuously reseeds and to add seeds each time. Ours is like… probably an acre total between two areas so a lot easier for us to do that. But I will say tilling helps keep grass from taking hold while perennials do their thing.
I pull the grass and other weeds before they have chance to smother the things I want.
Put the roots and crowns back in the ground. Cut the dead stems an inch or two from ground level. Mulch sooner than later, your natives will happily find their way through two inches of mulch.
Also, and this is especially important for native growers imo, learn to give things a chop or a pinch to promote growth habits that are more compact and delay/stimulate more flowering so you can get the most out of them!
Grass growing in your bed is almost inevitable, if you haven’t edged your bed properly to stop the grass it will creep back in . If your bed is new I would wait until the plants are growing strong because you might damage lots of potential seedlings growing from seeds . In many beds I added edging because of this issue , it’s tough to deal with it . I have a lot of wild garlic that’s another problem .
Grass-B-gone before the natives emerge, or even after if they are not grasses/monocots.
Weed it manually or spot treat with herbicide.
If you don’t want grass to move into a bed, you need to add a border. If you can, add 1-2 feet of wood chips / mulch around your garden bed. Then you’ll focus on weeding that border instead of the bed itself.
For the bed itself, you’ll need to focus on removing any plants growing from the existing seed bank in the ground while the bed establishes.
Personally I would let the grasses grow until I can recognize them as lawn grass and then remove.
For large annual weeds, I would let them grow and then chop them down and compost them or drop them somewhere outside of the bed.
Most native plants do better in deprived soil, where most aggressive weeds thrive in nutrient rich soil. So allowing plants like amaranth grow is you’re improving the quality of the soil for natives while degrading it for rich soil loving weeds.
Also, knowing that you’ll need to enter into the bed to do work means you should also plan where you’ll want to step so you don’t crunch your bugs. If you can get flat pieces of wood or stones, add those to the garden bed in between your plants once you have an idea where they’re situated.